


Stone Road to Jericho

by Tesserae



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s05e13 The Song Remains the Same, Gen, Pre-Series, casefic, spn_reversebang
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-12
Updated: 2011-12-12
Packaged: 2017-10-27 06:18:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/292550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tesserae/pseuds/Tesserae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once Sam leaves for Stanford, John realizes he's got to rethink his plan for keeping the boys safe. Cue one lunch lady, a pair of sirens and a small plaster angel, and maybe, just maybe, John will find the demon he's hunted for what feels like forever in California.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stone Road to Jericho

He tells Dean to drop Sam at the bus station to catch the bus that’ll take him out to California.

“Stanford,” Sam had said that spring, dropping the words carefully into the space between his father, his brother and himself. “I’m gonna go to law school when I finish my undergrad,” he’d added, mouth set into a mulish line and his face pale in the greenish light of the diner’s fluorescent tubes. He was eating one-handed, the other one jammed into the pocket of his jacket as if there was something there he was afraid of losing. John was pretty sure the gesture was aimed at him, but when Dean opened his mouth to lay into Sam, John decided to to bide his time.

He bides it all the way up until it’s time for Sam to leave, working them hard enough that they sleep without dreaming and wake up stunned from the combination of heat and exhaustion and too much cheap beer. At the end of the summer, barely able to listen to the excitement bubbling through Sam’s voice every time he opens his mouth, he still makes sure they’re no more than a day’s drive away from Palo Alto.

And then, having worked his way through everything he’s got, John hands over the task of making Sam stay to Dean. Dean – well, if he’s ever had any questions about the connection he’d forged between the boys, he’s put them mostly to rest, watching Dean hover over Sam until the kid finally snaps.

“Jesus Christ, the two of you need another hobby!” Sam yells, breaking the tension like a summer thunderstorm after weeks of rising humidity.

“How the hell can you walk away?” Dean’s voice is hoarse and blurred with booze. John’s seen Sam take his bus ticket out and look at it a dozen times. Each time he does, Dean reaches for the bottle of whiskey he’d slammed down on the motel’s coffee table that afternoon.

“How the hell can’t I?” Sam jumps to his feet. He starts toward Dean, hands outstretched, pleading with his brother to understand.

There’s a sudden crash as Dean sweeps his glass off the low table to shatter against the fake stone of the room’s fireplace. “Shut the fuck up, Sammy!”

Sam’s face changes, his fists coming up in front of his body. John stands up and muscles in between them, grabbing Sam to turn him away from Dean. “Dean, go to bed. Now,” he throws over his shoulder. “Sammy, you walk out that door in the morning, you don’t get to come back.”

Sam’s hazel eyes go wide as he watches his brother head into the motel’s tiny bedroom. “Dad,” he starts, but John shakes his head.

“You too. Go to bed. You got a decision to make.”

When Sam turns away to follow Dean, John takes what’s left of the whiskey and heads out to the concrete pad in front of the motel room door. He settles into one of the rusting metal chairs and sits back to watch the moon rise, yellow and enormous in the east. They’re far enough outside St. George that the sky is inky black between the moon and the mountains, the Milky Way just starting to shimmer into sight.

By the time he’s done with the whiskey, the moon is dropping away in the west and John is convinced he’s fucked this up beyond the telling of it. He hauls himself out of the chair, pitches the bottle into the trash, and gives the narrow couch a baleful look. No help for it, though: nothing short of a demon attack would send John into the room where his sons are sleeping, not tonight.

  
The next morning, Sam stumbles out of bed first, looking pale and rumpled and not much older than twelve. John grits his teeth until his jaw creaks, but manages to merely lift an eyebrow in Sam's direction. Sam just shakes his head without answering and disappears into the bathroom

When Dean wakes up twenty minutes later, John’s got all three duffel bags packed and sitting by the door. He jerks his head toward the parking lot. “Put the boy on the bus already, we gotta go,” he tells Dean.

Dean, looking like he’s going to crack a molar from the strain of not arguing, loads Sam and his duffle into the Impala and sits there in brittle silence, waiting for John doesn’t know what. John finally flips a credit card through the window in Sam’s direction and then walks back to stand, arms crossed, in the doorway of the motel room.

Dean revs the engine until it screams, and then Sam is gone.

*

John grabs his bag, shuts the room door behind him and heads back out into the parking lot. His truck is where he’d parked it a few days earlier. He’s been making Dean do the driving when they’re on a job for more than a day, because if the Impala sucks gas like a mother John’s truck is worse. He throws a glance back at the road, climbs into the truck and heads the opposite direction.

He hopes Dean does the smart thing and takes Sam to the Greyhound station to put him on the bus they’d bought the ticket for. Way he figures it, if Dean decides to take the kid all the way to Stanford, he can; John got them close enough to California that the bus made more sense than driving, although “sensible” has never held much appeal for his oldest son in the past, especially not where Sam was concerned.

Two hours down the road, a call from Ellen Harvelle gives him a case he can wrap in a day or two.

“Ordinary ghost?” he asks her, and she laughs, her voice whiskey-warm and kind in a way that makes his throat hurt.

“John Winchester, is there such a thing?” There’s a flare of music behind her. He hears a door slam, and then it’s quiet again. “Assholes,” she says cheerfully. “Where was I?”

“Ghost,” he prompts, and waits.

“Oh yeah. Look, you ever heard of La Llorona?”

John searches back through the list he’s keeping of all the things he’s killed and draws a blank. “Sounds female,” he says.

“What, you leaving those to Dean these days?”

“No,” John says sharply. “Ellen. What is this thing?”

It turns out to be a question he wishes he hadn’t asked. La Llorona, it seems, eats runaway children. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

But – “Kids, John,” is all she says, and John sighs and writes the coordinates on the back of his hand. He makes her promise to keep her ears open for other, more serious things and when she agrees, reluctantly, he tells her he’ll call when La Llorona is dead.

He texts the coordinates to Dean when he pulls off the highway to get gas, and by nightfall he’s in El Paso, Texas. He checks into a motel with a view of the tenements on the other side of the Rio Grande, and settles in to wait for Dean.

*

Dean doesn’t say much when he rolls into El Paso the next morning, red-eyed and vibrating from too much Red Bull. The case itself isn’t too taxing. La Llorona turns out to be a lunch lady at the local school with a taste for telenovelas and an overactive imagination. Fortunately, she hasn’t so much eaten the kids as stashed them in her basement – saving them up for a rainy day, maybe, or she’s telling the truth and the kids broke into the basement on their own. He feels sorry for her swollen ankles, for the way she collapses into her flowered armchair, for the sad tiny house with its shelves of ceramic babies, and he’s half-minded to let her go after he shoos the kids out the back door, telling them to leave the old ladies alone from now on.

But then Dean points out that the broken glass is all lying in the garden, not on the basement floor, and the lights start to flicker. John pulls out his semi-automatic and yells at Dean to move, dammit, but the lunch lady starts hissing and spits something caustic at them, and yeah, hunters carry guns loaded with silver bullets for a _good fucking reason_.

He just needs to remember that more quickly next time.

Afterwards, when they’re back at the motel, he makes Dean show him his wrist. Tiny deep burns dot the skin over his wrist bone, angry red against the tanned skin. “These hurt?”

Dean snorts. “I’ll wash the demon splurge off and put some stuff on ‘em, be fine by morning.”

John nods. “Good thing you noticed that glass.”

Dean gives him an incredulous look, but all he says is, “Even Sam’ll tell you lunch ladies never use their powers for good,” before disappearing into the bathroom for longer than John considers strictly necessary. He watches the door, considering, but finally the shower goes on and John settles back onto his bed and feigns sleep until Dean is done and snoring away.

It’s not like he knows what to say to the boy. That was always Mary’s job, after all.

*

They split up a couple of times so John can chase the leads he’s getting without feeding his son to the demon he still hasn’t admitted he’s chasing. Dean hates it, tries to tell him there’s no possible way he’s safer on his own than with Dean on his six, but John just accuses him of watching too many war movies and ends the discussion. He doesn’t actually care if _he’s_ safer, that’s not the point. Hunting is the point, has always been the point, and he’s a little surprised that Dean isn’t agitating to go off on his own more, if he’s honest. But then they meet up in Jackson Hole to track something killing skiers, and John climbs into the Impala and looks around immediately for Sam, and gets it, right away. Without Sammy to look after, Dean’s off-balance, like something took a limb off him.

In any normal family, hell, in the family he and Mary thought they were starting when they found out she was pregnant with Dean, boys would go off to college and come back laden with laundry and new girlfriends. Trips to places like Jackson Hole would mean vacation, whoo hoo! In the family John has, they come to places like this at the ass end of March and hope the monsters don’t ski.

The thing menacing yuppies turns out to be a Trickster. Should have known that going in, John tells Dean later; what the hell else would think disguising itself as a tree and jumping out into the middle of a black diamond slope was _entertaining_? But the tree had taken out a B-list celebrity and some politician’s kid, so instead of getting into an argument, John trained a pistol crossbow on it and brought it down from the relative safety of the lift. He suggests to the youngsters running the lift shack that they haul a couple of barricades out there, keep everyone off the slope until they’re sure it’s safe, but they stare at him like he’s trying to get them to clean their rooms and edge away slowly. Which forces John to take extreme measures.

Afterwards, he’s pretty pleased with himself. In his heart of hearts, John _likes_ extreme measures.

Dean’s leaning on the truck, his collar raised against the wind, when John makes it back down the hill. Two girls in enormous fur boots are watching him from the other side of the parking lot. Dismissing them with a glance, John walks around to the back and swings the lift gate down. Dean tramps after him.

“I heard an explosion - we good to go?”

John nods at him without answering and starts disassembling the crossbow with sharp fast movements. Some jobs need something quieter than a shotgun, and he likes the bow. It’s smaller by half than the standard kind but it can take down a grizzly bear. Or a Trickster, provided he’s got it loaded properly.

“What did you do?” Dean asks, staring at the bow. Dean likes extreme measures, too.

“Bummed a cigarette off one of the kids, wrapped a little C4 around it and shot the thing again.” John allows himself a grin. He loosens the nuts that hold the tension in the bow’s cables and wipes down its limbs. “Triggered an avalanche, but the kids said those happen all the time. And I’m pretty sure there’s nothing more than sawdust under all that snow. Guess we’ll know come summer.” He fits the bow into its case, wraps the extra bolts in a piece of leather and tucks them into the foam, then fits the case back into its space and slams the gate. He glances up at the sky and motions Dean around to the cab. “Come on, I want to get off this hill before Loki discovers I’ve taken out one of his, er, seedlings.”

Two days later he gets a call from a hunter Ellen knows who’s passing on a tip about a demon with yellow eyes. He leaves Dean a set of coordinates that’ll get him safely to Pastor Jim’s and heads north toward the Canadian border, Dickie Betts and Eric Clapton on an endless loop in the cassette deck.

*

They see Sam precisely once that first year, and Dean’s cell stops ringing, at least when John’s with him. He wonders which one of them started it, but then decides he doesn’t really want to know. And hell, if it keeps Sam out of the way and safe it’s better they’re not talking. With the task ahead of him – getting Dean up to speed so he can cut him loose and track the yellow-eyed demon full time – it’s just flat-out _easier_ not having to worry about Sam, too.

After Sam’s birthday comes and goes without Sam returning either of their phone calls, John speeds up his own schedule, aiming to give Dean his first solo gig by early summer. He even digs up a set of boxing gloves and an uppercut bag, and Dean practices until the bones in his hands have to be aching. “Toughen you up, boy,” is all John says when Dean bitches at him.

In June, Sam texts them to say he’s staying out in California and working for one of his professors until classes start up in the fall.

A week later, John’s found Dean a hunt that promises to be as much of a cakewalk as their jobs ever are. It’s a straightforward haunting a hundred miles down the road, a group of children’s book writers who let things get a little out of hand. Dean’s as ready as he’s going to be, but John stays halfway to drunk for three days after Dean leaves.

On the fourth day, he falls out of bed, finds the nearest library branch and waits with all the other homeless people by the front door until it opens. Then he heads straight for the newspapers. The library’s big enough to have local papers from all over, Seattle and New Orleans and even Bangor, Maine. John can feel himself starting to smile: they’ve been kicking around the Midwest all spring, and he’s getting tired of flat roads and grain silos.

He pulls a couple of likely possibilities off the rack. Towns big enough to have papers but small enough to need local coverage to fill the pages are the best bets: church suppers, Chamber of Commerce breakfasts and Girl Scout campouts attract more vengeful spirits than most people realize, he’s found. An hour later, he’s got what he needs, reports of a rash of rabid animal attacks on some island near Seattle.

A quick question to one of the librarians gets him a card for the copy machine and thirty minutes on one of the library’s computers. Vashon Island, the local tourist authority tells him, is home to ten thousand people, a strawberry festival, and a factory specializing in artificial bones.

“You’re going _where_?” Dean asks him when he finally answers his phone.

“Seattle,” John says, steering with one hand and unfolding a map with the other, his phone tucked into his shoulder. “I checked out of the motel. Call you when I get there. You gank the ghost yet?”

“Yeah, did a salt and burn last night.” Dean yawns loudly.

John glances at the dashboard clock, which reads eleven am, and grins. There’s maybe something to be said for fresh air and plenty of exercise after all. “Get the grave filled back in?”

“Dad.”

“Okay, okay.” Spotting the onramp for the highway, John squints at it and swings his truck into the right lane. “Look, Dean, get in touch with Bobby Singer, see if he’s got anything for you. I’ll call when I’m done up north.”

“Will do. Talk to you soon.”

“Yep.” John lets the phone fall into his lap and folds it closed. He stashes it in the console, turns the radio up and guns his truck up the ramp and onto the highway heading west. He hasn’t hunted a werewolf in years. This is going to be downright fun.

*

It isn’t, of course. Turns out it’s not a werewolf but some kind of skinwalker masquerading as one of the lab techs at the bone place. He gets a nasty scratch down his left arm the first night – he’s going to need to cast a couple of silver bullets, which pisses him off – and can barely move the fingers on that hand by morning. The doctor at the town’s walk-in clinic tapes him up and, telling him to drop his trousers, sticks a needle larger than anything John’s got in his first aid kit into the meat of his ass.

Half a gallon of penicillin later, the doc smacks John on the other cheek and tells him to get dressed.

“Thanks, doc,” John says, wincing as he pulls up his pants.

The doctor makes a note on her chart and glances up. “You’re welcome, Mr. – ah, Blackmore. Unusual name,” she adds, one eyebrow lifting delicately. She’s pretty, with red hair pulled back into a loose knot, and from the lines around her eyes and mouth, older than John had thought at first. “What did you say did this to you?”

“I didn’t.” John grabs his jacket from the chair. “Do you need to write me a prescription for more antibiotics?” He flexes his hand experimentally. The fingers are still sluggish but there’s less pain than there was earlier. He slides the hand into his pocket. It still feels like it belongs to someone else. “This is going to get better, right?”

“It should. When was your last tetanus shot?”

John’s not stupid. He keeps that one up to date, for himself as well as the boys. “Five years ago. But it wasn’t a –“

 _Shit._

The doctor quirks a grin at him. “I didn’t think it was. Maybe I should ask you when your last rabies shot was? Seems we’re having a bit of an outbreak here.”

This one he’s prepared to lie about. He’s fairly sure that whatever had tried to take his arm off last night was immune to germs. “Couple years back,” he tells her easily. “Me and my boys, we do a lot of hunting.” Okay, not so much of a lie, all told.

She purses her lips, watches him for a moment longer, and finally shuts the folder. “Very well. But if you start to notice headaches, paranoia, anything weird, get your affairs in order, hmm?” She stands up and whisks herself out of the tiny room before he can tell her that paranoia, at least, is pretty much breakfast of champions in his world.

On the way out the door, he calls his son. Dean shows up the next day, knocking once on the motel room’s door shortly after dawn. “I was in Colorado,” he says by way of an explanation. “Another ghost. Man, these writer’s groups –“ his voice trails off, and he tugs his collar up to cover a bruise on his neck.

John hides a grin and points him toward the coffee maker. Writers, yep. “You kill it?”

Dean pours all four coffee packets into the basket and turns it on. “Yeah,” he says, and changes the subject. “You said you had a werewolf?”

“Skinwalker, I think.” John lays out what he’s got and tells Dean about the bone place.

“You been in to talk to them?”

“I got distracted.” John pulls his hand out of his coat and lays his arm carefully on the table between them. The swelling’s gone down but the skin is still red and inflamed.

“Nice.” Dean gives it a dispassionate look, a muscle working in his jaw. “Did you get a look at whoever it was before it joined the Alpo generation?”

"Nope." He puts his journal on the table, opens it, and slides it over to Dean. There’s a sketch on the page that he’d done the morning before, waiting for the red-haired doctor to come patch him up. Dean pulls the journal closer and peers at the sketch.

"Is this a German shepard or a chupacabra? Jesus, Dad."

John just grunts and jerks his chin toward his hand. "Like I said, I was distracted."

The coffee maker stops gurgling and shuts itself off. Dean hauls himself to his feet and crosses the room. He divides the jet black liquid between two cups and waves a handful of sugar packets in John’s direction. “One lump or two?”

“Three.” The answer nets him a raised eyebrow, but Dean obediently empties a stream of sugar into the cup.

“Thanks.” John motions him toward the wall above the room’s peeling dresser. He’d spent most of yesterday on the phone and in the town’s tiny library, razoring articles out of back issues of the local free weekly. “There are a couple of clippings you should look at over there.” Dean glances over at it and then down at the clock bolted to the bedside table. It’s six am, the light just barely starting to slide under the edge of the curtains.

Dean looks uncomfortable for a moment, then crosses his arms. “Look, Dad. This bone place won’t be open for a couple hours yet, and I’ve been driving since you called. I’m gonna grab a couple hours’ sleep before I go gank your new friend, if that’s okay with you.”

“Suit yourself,” John says gruffly. “Pretty sure the thing can’t swim or it wouldn’t still be here.” Dean doesn’t move, and John leans back in his chair, elaborately casual, and reaches for his coffee. “Go to sleep if you’re going, Jesus, Dean. It’s not going to wait until you’re ready before killing someone else.”

The smile falls off Dean’s face. He rolls himself into a ball, still dressed, his back to John. John’s expecting him to stew, but he’s snoring before John finishes his coffee.

  
In the end the thing, which Dean insists on calling Lassie, proves to be easy to kill. Dean bullshits his way into the artificial bone facility and charms a hapless receptionist into pointing him toward the animal lab, where another, more harried receptionist slips up and drops a name. The name belongs to one of their star researchers, a woman who’s been unaccountably gone for three days. Yes, she lives on the island; no, they haven’t heard from her; no, he can’t tell Dean about the research, but there’ll be no more three-legged dogs if she’s right.

Dean tells John by cell phone that he hadn’t realized three-legged dogs were such a problem for science. John just grunts and gets him to spell the researcher’s name. They track her to the woods behind her house, down a path that seems well-traveled in spite of the brush pulled carefully across it.

“Is that a _doghouse_?” Dean asks when they stumble across the little log shed, and John wants to roll his eyes but the researcher chooses that moment to burst out of the shed with a wild growl, and Dean pauses, takes careful aim, and puts John’s last silver bullet into her heart.

“What now?” Dean asks, and John shrugs.

“Seems like someone should have stopped her before she got to this point.” He leans down and runs a hand along the silky fur of her flank as her heart slows. In a moment, she’s going to lose her animal skin. “And way before she killed anyone.” He stands up, dusting his hands off on his jeans and pulling out his cell phone. He punches in 9-1-1.

“Cops? Not a fire?”

John grunts, waves a hand at the dripping woods around them. “You want to try to set any of this on fire, be my guest.” He the glances down at the woman’s body lying at his feet. “Stupid fucking thing. Demons are bad enough without people trying to build their own bad guys.”

Dean throws him a startled glance. "You think she made more?"

"Yeah, I do." He shoves at Dean to get him moving. "Come on, we got more work to do."

*

Sam’s second year in college comes and goes. John gets a hunter he knows in L.A. to drive up the coast and check on Sam. Sam’s good, his contact reports, seems to have friends and to actually be going to class. “He looks happy, John,” the guy says, and offers to send pictures.

That night, John gets drunk.

He sends the guy a spare credit card and tells him to keep checking when he’s got the time. Midway through Sam’s third year, he collects Dean from a solo hunt in Tennessee and drives them both down to Panama City for a little R&R. Dean spends a week lying in the thin sunshine humming snatches of Jimmy Buffett songs while John watches him from inside the motel room and works his way methodically through every phone number he’s got, looking for leads. But the trail seems to be growing colder the farther away he gets from Lawrence and the night of Sam’s six-month birthday.

Dean makes friends with the girl in the room next door.

Carmel Rolla (“Rock ‘n Rolla!” Dean says happily when she introduces himself, and John sits back to see if she’s going to pull a weapon) has jet black hair, the body of an exotic dancer and a taste for garage sales that would put a hoarder to shame. John’s amusement dims only slightly when Dean, between much throat-clearing and foot-shuffling, asks if he can borrow the keys to the truck to haul “a few things” back to the storage unit Carmel and her mother have rented.

John notes the color high on Dean’s freckled cheekbones and drains his beer. “What the hell, son, you’re gonna need some help with that job, I’m guessing.” He climbs to his feet and stretches elaborately. “Why don’t I come with you?”

Dean grits his teeth, looking as if he wishes a demon would choose that moment to distract them, but Carmel’s voice comes through the door instead.

“Dean, honey, you ready?” she says, and Dean’s shoulders slump. John whacks him on one arm and grabs his keys.

“You go with Carmel and her mom. I’ll follow you.”

Carmel’s mother is already ensconsed in her Lincoln, window rolled down and clouds of cigarette smoke billowing out. “Thanks, John!” she yells, peeling out of the parking lot before he can get the truck started. Bemused, he takes off after them.

The garage sale in question is a straggling operation in front of a house that seems to be collapsing into the tangle of dying landscaping around it. Its owners, an old couple whose skin and hair and clothes are the same cement gray as the house, offer unsteady smiles as Carmel’s mother pulls her car up onto their lawn and waves.

“This here’s John,” she says from the front seat, looking like she’s staying put. “He’s gonna load everything up.”

John climbs out of the truck. The old man gives him an unreadable look and ushers the three of them into the house.

Once inside, he leads them into a tiny dim living room. John looks around, and as his eyes adjust to the gloom, he realizes that the room isn’t so much _tiny_ as overflowing with furniture, all of it laden with ornaments.

“All of this?” he asks faintly, and the old man wheezes a laugh.

“Nope, just this one,” he says, pointing toward a tall cabinet with immaculately clean glass shelves. “M’wife already cleared it out.”

John moves around to one side of the cabinet and grips its corners, rocking it gently to test its weight. It’s lighter than it looks, probably more particle board than mahogany or some other fancy wood. He motions Dean around to the other side. The old man points toward a pair of sliding glass doors.

John glances at Dean. “You take the top and go first. Looks like a straight shot out to the yard.” They pivot the cabinet away from the wall and Dean reaches up to grasp its corner finials. The cabinet slides over easily, and John hoists it up by its legs. Just as Dean starts to back toward the door, though, one of its drawers slides open, spilling a small white figurine onto the floor. “Dean, hold up!”

Dean stops and John lets the legs down carefully. The old man walks back over to them and picks up the figurine, and starts to hand it to John. John stares at it until his vision starts to splinter, shards of memory – Mary, the baby, sunlight pouring in through a window, his own voice saying, “Then I love it too” - breaking around him like glass. “Dad,” Dean says, as if from farther away than the head of the cabinet, and John sits down on the tile floor hard enough to feel the impact all the way up to his jaw.

When his sight clears, his son is crouching next to him, snapping his fingers. “Dad!” Carmel and the old man are standing behind Dean. Not bothering to hide the gesture, Carmel glances at her watch.

“I’m okay, I’m okay.” He shakes his head. Mary and the baby’s crib disappear. “Help me up,” he adds. “Let’s get this thing going, Dean.”

  
Dean hauls him to his feet and they cart the cabinet out into the front yard, where Carmel’s mother is still sitting in her car and the old man’s wife is piling clothes and toys back onto the front porch. Once the cabinet is loaded into the truck and secured, Carmel hands over a pile of bills and climbs back into the Lincoln. Dean, looking indecisive, gets into the car with them, and once they’re safely in the street the old man walks over to John.

“Didn’t figure that was your wife,” he says with a glance at the ring on John’s left hand. “Reckon she’s gone, so me and the missus want you to have this.” He hands John the figurine that had fallen out of the cabinet, a small white angel with its chin propped on its hands and its wings arching over its shoulders. “Figure you could use some watching over if you let the girl get her hands on that son of yours.” He closes John’s hand around the angel and smiles toothlessly. “I was you, I’d drop the cabinet off a bridge, grab your boy and run. But that’s just me.”

John gets a grip on the old man’s wrist and the smile goes impossibly wider. John peers at him intently, looking for any sign of black in the eyes, but there’s nothing, just an old man with an instinct about another kind of predator. John lets him go and pulls back, the angel nestled in his hand.

“Poppa!” the old woman yells sharply from the porch.

“Coming, Momma.” He turns back to John with a laugh that turns into a hacking cough. “Keep the angel, son. But think about that bridge.”

John puts the angel on the seat next to him and starts the truck. He watches the man in his rearview mirror until he rounds the corner at the end of the street. Back at the motel, after dropping the cabinet at Carmel’s storage unit, he swaps the angel for his heaviest sawed-off. He stashes it in the lift gate, then grabs what he needs to make the shells for the gun.

Back in the room, he fills a pair of shells with bronze shot, adding a few fragments of bloodstained fabric from the hem of one of Dean’s t-shirts. Shortly after dark, he turns off the lights, unlocks his door, and lays the shotgun across the table. And then he waits.

Carmel walks into the room first, but he holds off until her mother appears in the doorway behind her. From this distance, the shells in the sawed-off should take them both out. But he wants to know where Dean is first: bronze can do as much damage as lead at close range.

Dean, it turns out, is in the trunk of the Lincoln.

“How’d they get the jump on you, son?” he asks, slicing through the layers of duct tape binding Dean’s wrists and his ankles.

Dean flushes a hard red and rips the tape off his mouth. “Um,” is all he says, his eyes looking everywhere but at his father.

John reaches out, cups the boy’s jaw in his hand and turns him toward the light. There’s a bruise blooming in the fine skin of his neck, and John can see what looks like teeth marks in the heart of it. Exactly what he’d thought.

Dean hoists himself out of the car, taking in the shotgun dangling from John’s hand and the two bodies slowly shriveling to husks in the doorway of their motel room. He shudders hard and scrubs his hands over his face. John’s expecting him to ask how he figured it out, but the question that finally comes out of his son’s mouth surprises him. “Why’d you let me go with them? If, you know, you knew they were _sirens_?” Dean’s biting at the inside of his cheek, a muscle jumping in his jaw. Above their heads, the single street lamp illuminating the parking lot pops and hisses and goes out. John grabs him by the arm and drags him over to the truck.

He throws the door to the truck’s passenger side open, but Dean crosses his arms over his chest and doesn’t budge, the frown line deepening between his brows. John storms around to the driver’s side and slams the door behind him. He’s prepared to have this conversation if Dean wants it. But somebody had to have noticed he’d used a shotgun on Carmel and her mother, and right now, he wants to be back on the road to Memphis, not sitting here waiting for the local law to show up. “Get in the truck. Or I am leaving your sorry ass here.”

John turns the key in the ignition and guns the engine until the tach climbs into the red. “Now!” he barks at Dean, and finally, _finally_ Dean relents, swinging himself into the cab and coiling himself into the corner, hunched and tight with resentment. John peels the truck out of the parking lot, wheels spinning on the sand drifting across the asphalt, and turns out onto the state road that leads back to the interstate. An endless string of fast food restaurants, tire stores and check-cashing joints spools past the windows, and John wonders briefly how many hours he’s spent glancing at the back of one or another of their pissed-off heads, wishing for Mary.

A few silent miles later he spots the sign for the interstate and jerks the wheel hard right. Once they’re on the highway, the businesses thin out to cluster, bright and garish, at the exits, and John finally gets tired of waiting for Dean and throws a tape into the deck.

The tape’s rolling over to play again when Dean sits up and pokes a finger at the _eject_ button John blinks at him in the sudden ringing silence.

“You staked me out for them,” Dean says.

John glances at him and then back at the road. He hopes it hasn’t taken Dean two hours to figure this out. “Yep.” He can see Dean digesting this bit of information, and silently wills him to keep going.

“How did you know they wouldn’t kill me?”

“I didn’t.” He pulls the truck onto the shoulder and rolls down his window. The night is full of bullfrogs, the highway empty at this hour.

John’s had hours – years, really - to think about it, but he still has no idea how to hand this to his son. “Dean. At some point you are going to have to use everything you’ve got to kill the monsters. Even things you love. And you’ll do it because you have no choice.” He stops, swallowing convulsively, and places his hands on the wheel. He can see Dean thinking about it, and suspects his son is just arrogant enough to dismiss the whole _duct-taped and locked in a trunk_ part as a minor detail.

Which may be a working survival strategy on Dean’s part, come to think of it.

“If I thought you couldn’t take care of yourself I’d have left you in Sioux Falls and made Bobby give you a job. You’d have figured something out, once you got through the tape.”

Dean’s shoulders relax, and when he turns to face John, there’s the ghost of a grin on his lips. “Bobby woulda killed me sooner than Carmel, and I wouldn’t have gotten laid first.”

John contents himself with a snort. _Apple, tree,_ Mary would have said, but John still can’t see it.

Eight hours later he drops Dean in Memphis and calls Ellen. “Port Arthur. Go,” she tells him, and John follows the signs until he’s heading south again. He’s got a lead and two hundred dollars in his boot, enough to get him into east Texas if he sleeps in the truck on the way. And for the moment, his boys are safe, Sam in his normal life and Dean in the belief he can survive anything.

It’s enough, it’s got to be.

*

Five hours into the trip, somewhere outside Shreveport, he realizes the lines striping the highway are starting to get up and dance. The coffee he drank in Memphis is long gone from his bloodstream and settling in his bladder, so he pulls into a church parking lot, drops a couple of bucks into the collection box and asks politely for the men’s room. The pastor gives him a hard look but lets him wash up.

Walking back to the truck, he thinks about getting back on the road but pulls a sleeping bag out of the back and sacks out in the cab instead. Be hard to kill anything from a crumpled heap of metal on the side of a Louisiana bayou.

Wedged onto the truck’s sagging plastic bench seat, wind whistling through the window he left cracked open, he dreams about Mary. He doesn’t get those dreams much, figures it was the Motown station he’d picked up near Little Rock. Mary sang _Hey Jude_ instead of lullabies to her boys but when John got home from work and found her dancing with them instead, it was always to the Supremes or the Ronettes or, once in a while, Stevie Wonder. She liked the beat, she’d said the first time, blushing a little, and John grinned, swung Dean up in the air and sang along at the top of his lungs, making the baby giggle. It was the chorus to _Superstition_ , he remembers.

Which, in hindsight, might not have been the best idea.

He sleeps hard for a few hours and then wakes up grimy-eyed and vibrating from the force of the dream. He splashes water from a half-empty bottle onto the hem of his t-shirt and wipes it across his face, peering around. He needs coffee and another trip to the men’s room, but the church is dark, the parking lot long emptied of its few cars. He shrugs and starts the ignition.

When he turns the radio on, Motown is gone, replaced by someone warbling about Jesus in a voice that makes John twitch. Mary hadn’t had a lot of patience with the faithful, rolling her eyes at the earnest invitations to church suppers and Bible classes that came their way after Samuel and Deanna died. Whatever peace she was going to find, she told him, was going to come from knowing they’d died quickly and painlessly, not from eating tuna-noodle casserole, no matter how tasty. He drops Derek and the Dominoes into the tape deck and loses himself in the guitars.

Twenty-four hours later, he wishes he’d left the tape in and driven straight through Port Arthur and out the other side. No wonder Janis left, he thinks. Not even demons can be bothered to stick around and wreak havoc on a place that seems to be mostly oil refineries.

“Nothing at all?” Ellen says when he calls her. She sounds tired again, the noise of the bar washing around her like a moon-heavy tide.

John shakes his head before remembering he’s on the phone. “Nada.” Shit, he’s tired.

“Where are you going next?”

“I don’t know. Back up north, probably, before the weather gets too bad.” He wants to head out to California, maybe stop by Palo Alto, see if he can’t get a glimpse of Sam. He doesn’t say any of this to Ellen.

“Okay, well, you want to take a couple of jobs on the way you let me know. Otherwise I’m giving ‘em to Rufus or Bobby. And you know how much I hate calling Bobby Singer.”

“Rufus can’t do it, you call Dean,” he tells her.

There’s a long silence. John watches idly as more miles of Texas road disappear under the hood. The landscape has changed and the horizon shimmers faintly, far away under the arc of the sky.

“You sure about letting the boy hunt solo?” Ellen says finally.

John thinks about all the possible answers he could give her. But really, it comes down to one thing: he’s going to need Dean to watch out for Sam, and Dean needs to be ready. Readier than he was in Florida, smarter, and Ellen won’t hold back with the jobs she gives him the way John thinks he’s maybe been doing. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah.”

That night, sleeping in his truck somewhere between Dallas and oblivion, he dreams about Mary again.

*

Two days later Ellen calls him back. First it’s Mexico, then Colorado, then a hunt that involves a shifter who wears Mary’s face for its last twenty-four hours on earth, and all told it’s another six months before he can think about California again. When he does, it’s summer, even in the high plains north of Denver, and John sweeps the fast food wrappers out of the cab of his truck and heads for Bobby Singer’s.

Bobby offers him a cup of coffee and a bed. John takes the coffee and the bottle of whiskey Bobby sets down beside it. He says no to the bed. He’s used to sleeping in the truck now, even if cold mornings make him feel as if he’ll never get his spine straight again.

Bobby pulls out a chair and sits down, reaching for the bottle. He tips a healthy measure into what sounds like an empty cup and stares into it for a moment before speaking. “What are you doing here, John?”

“You gotta find me something, Bobby.”

“What, like a job?” Bobby looks irritated. “You drove all the way up here to ask me to find you a _job_? I look like the classifieds to you?”

John reaches for the bottle and tops up his coffee. “No, I drove all the way up here to drink your whiskey, asshole.”

There’s a long pause. Water drips in the sink, not quite keeping time with the tick of a clock somewhere in the house. John’s hands itch to turn the water off or smash the clock to pieces, anything to stop the syncopation. He wraps them around the cup instead.

Finally, Bobby breaks the silence. “I heard Ellen’s been feeding you leads. None of ‘em pan out?”

“Bupkes,” John says, and then he puts everything he’s got into his voice, not too proud to beg for his boys. “Bobby, I gotta get this thing. Sam’s gonna be out of school soon, I owe him more than this.” He glances at the piles of books that crowd the table and spill out into the hallways. If John’s sleeping in his truck so his wife can find his dreams, Bobby Singer appears to be using ancient texts to summon his. “Not that you haven’t done a nice job with the place since Karen died.”

Bobby scowls at him and scrubs a hand over his face. “What about Dean?”

“Dean likes this life.” Which is something John really, _really_ doesn’t want to think about. He picks up his coffee cup and stares into it, swirling the dense-looking liquid around before tipping it up to his mouth and draining it. The effect is instantaneous: the whiskey burns clear down to his spine and flames out from there, running fire back up into his throat. He pushes the chair back and leans forward, coughing. Bobby thumps a heavy arm across his back and laughs.

When he can breathe again, John sits up and glares at Bobby. “Warn a guy, Jesus!” He hauls himself to his feet and goes over to the sink to stick his head under the tap. After a few blessedly wet minutes, he turns the water off and, eyes streaming, gropes around for a towel. “Seriously, Bobby, the fuck is that stuff?”

“Free,” Bobby says shortly. He pushes his chair back to grab a threadbare dishcloth off the front of the stove and hands it to John. “You want to stay for a few days while I look for your demon, you’re welcome to. But buy your own damn whiskey, got it?”

*

In the end, it takes Bobby the rest of the summer and into the fall to turn up a lead. By the time he does, John’s stripped and cleaned all his own guns and most of Bobby’s, sharpened so many blades and throwing stars he’s had to buy a new stone, and refilled every bottle of holy water he’s got. In between trips into town and the odd hunt, he services the truck, puts new tires on it and gives the cab a thorough cleaning. He also makes sure the lock on the lift gate gets a shot of graphite lubricant – no point packing an arsenal if you can’t get to it when you need it.

He leaves the little angel where he’d put it. It’s been with him all year. He’d feel funny leaving it behind, even if his belief in guardian angels took a mortal blow twenty years ago and never recovered.

Three days into October, on a day that starts cold and promises snow by nightfall, Bobby hands him a piece of paper, and John calls his oldest son.

Dean’s voice is blurred with sleep when he answers, and there’s a feminine murmur behind him that makes John roll his eyes. “Get your ass in gear,” John says, with no preamble. “I’ve got a lead on a Woman in White, and I’m going to need your help.”

“Where?”

John hears the rustle of sheets and the girl’s voice raised in a complaint and smiles tightly. He reads the coordinates Bobby’d given him off the scrap of paper.

“– no, stay. Gimme a sec,” Dean says, sounding as if he’s holding the phone against his shoulder. John counts to ten, and then a toilet flushes, and Dean is back. “Jesus, Dad, where the hell is this? I’m all the way down in New Orleans, got a couple things to clean up here, you know?”

Christ. New Orleans. John’ll be lucky if he gets the kid back with nothing more than a case of the clap. Be a relief to have that as his biggest worry, he thinks, and suddenly John wants to give his son a couple of days of whatever passes for normal in their world. He knows how fast Dean can move when he needs to, knows he’ll show up if John orders him to, but he can spare Dean to a hunt and a pretty girl for the moment. So he says, as lightly as he can, “I’ll be in a place called Jericho. You finish up and I’ll see you in at the end of the week.”

Dean, cheerfully oblivious to anything past the gift John’s giving him, laughs. “I’ll get there when I can, Dad.”

John squeezes his eyes shut and forces himself to say something innocuous, something that’ll let Dean finish what he’s doing and show up in California with his reflexes intact. Then, dizzy with the weight of what he’s just brought into being, he drops the paper he’s holding onto the floor and slides down the kitchen cabinet after it, gripping the phone as if the satellite-fed voice of his son is the only thing keeping him from shattering into pieces.

“You do that, son,” he says, and holds onto the phone long after the line goes dead. He’s still sitting there when Bobby comes in, hands him a thermos of coffee and walks him out to his truck. Outside, the sky is racing with clouds. Trash bounces around John’s feet, fetching up against the truck’s tires, and he turns to Bobby with a wondering smile.

“Don’t say it,” Bobby warns him. “Any of it.”

John snorts. “Wasn’t gonna. Just – thanks, Bobby.” He swings himself up into the truck’s cab, then glances back. There’s one more thing he needs to ask for. “Take care of my boys?”

Bobby lifts his collar against the chill and settles his hat further down on his head. He meets John’s eyes in a brief acknowledgement – they both know what John’s up against, and even though there’s a glimmer of pity in Bobby’s eyes, John will take it. He doesn’t think he’s brought this on himself but he knows he’s brought it on his sons, and if he can’t see them safe in this world then pity’s the best he can do, and way more than he deserves.

“Thanks,” he says, meaning it, and as Bobby trudges back toward the house John eases the truck down Bobby’s driveway, past the piles of dead cars and the autumn-bare trees beating like wings in the sharp breeze.

As he gets closer to the road, he glances back at the house, half-expecting to see Bobby still standing there watching him, but the porch is empty, the door firmly shut. He pauses for a moment, then guns the truck around the corner until the back end fishtails on the cracked asphalt of the road. Jericho is a solid twenty-four hours west, and if John doesn’t get ahead of the storm, he’s going to be fighting the weather most of the way there.

When the tape in the deck clicks over, he pulls Clapton out and drops in Stevie Wonder’s _Talking Book_ , smiling as the music starts up. Maybe the sunlight chasing him down the road will hold. Maybe Dean will show up sooner than he promised, and they’ll stop in Palo Alto and buy Sam a cup of coffee. Yeah, and maybe pigs will – John stops himself before finishing the thought. Birds are the only things that fly, he reminds himself firmly. Birds and those weird squirrels he’d taken Sam to see once, at some zoo or other.

He glances up as the sunlight flares bright in his rearview mirror before sliding behind the clouds again, and sighs. So much for the weather holding. A few miles down the road, the first heavy flakes hit his windshield, and he lets the truck slow to sixty. He needs to get to California in one piece, start the work that will see his sons safe, like he’d promised his wife all those years ago.

And this time, this time he’s got a good feeling, like she’s riding along with him somehow.

  


~Epilogue~

They open the lift gate once Bobby drags the truck back to Sioux Falls, about a month after John’s death. They owe him the ammo at least, but Dean doesn’t want any of the rest of John’s arsenal in the Impala – it’d be too much like driving with his father peering over his shoulder from the back seat. And thinking of John in the back seat at all is just _wrong_ , so he banishes the whole train of thought from his head and walks back to the house to grab him and Sam another six-pack.

When he gets back, there’s a pile of guns and other hardware spread out on a tarp on the ground and Sam’s perched on the trunk of the Impala staring at something that looks, from a distance, like a skull.

“Dude, what the fuck –?”

Sam looks startled for a moment, then glances down at the thing in his hand and back up at Dean, half a smile tugging at his lips. “No idea what this is. You ever seen it?”

Dean hops up on the car and exchanges one of the longnecks for the thing in Sam’s hand. Close up, it’s a little china figurine of an angel. He laughs suddenly, remembering the last time he’d seen something like it, and sets it down between them. “Where’d you find that?”

“Back of Dad’s stash, stuck behind some of that foam. You got any idea what it’s doing there?”

Dean takes a long pull of his beer. The sun is setting and the still-unpainted metal of the car is warm beneath his ass. He leans back against the window and grins at his brother. “I ever tell you about the sirens we hunted in Florida?” he asks, and when Sam shakes his head, he adds, “Good. I ain’t going to, then. But listen hard, grasshopper, because the angel is the keeper of wisdom.” He spreads his arms expansively, and Sam elbows him in the side.

“One, don’t date girls with more than one storage unit.”

Sam picks up the little angel. “Has my brother been watching Oprah again?” he asks it, and Dean smacks him lightly. “What’s the second thing?”

Dean shuffles through a couple of choices, dropping one hand down onto the trunk of the car. The new piece is a good fit. He’d been lucky there. He lets the humor fall out of his voice and says, carefully, “I’m glad you’ve got my back, now that Dad’s gone.”

Sam sets the angel down carefully and tips the bottom of his bottle against its wing. “Okay,” he says easily, and the lines in his forehead relax. “You want to want find a home for this thing in the trunk, here?”

Dean thinks about it for a minute and tips his own beer bottle against its wing. “Nah.” He picks the little angel up and hurls it into the middle of the salvage yard. “It’s gonna protect us, Sammy, it might as well look out for Bobby too.”

Notes

 **A/N** : Written for [](http://spn-reversebang.livejournal.com/profile)[**spn_reversebang**](http://spn-reversebang.livejournal.com/) to [](http://mithborien.livejournal.com/profile)[**mithborien**](http://mithborien.livejournal.com/) ’s _Hey Jude_ vid, prompt 1079: “This vid is an exploration of the effects of wiping Mary and John's memory during _The song remains the same_.”  
 **A/N:2** Now with 100% more canon compliance, thanks to dedicated beta work from [](http://dear-tiger.livejournal.com/profile)[**dear_tiger**](http://dear-tiger.livejournal.com/).

Art masterpost: [ is here](http://mithborien.livejournal.com/105439.html)


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